When the major entered his room, Jereboam, his ancient body-servant, was dawdling about putting things to rights, his seamed visage under his white wool suggesting a charred stump beneath a crisp powdering of snow. “Jedge Chalmahs done tellyfoam ter ax yo’ ovah ter Gladden Hall ter suppah ter-night, suh,” he said. “De jedge ’low he gwine git eben wid yo’ fo’ dat las’ game ob pokah when yo’ done lam him.”
“Tell him not to-night, Jerry,” said the other wearily. “Some other time.”
The old darky ruminated as he plodded down to the doctor’s telephone. “Whut de mattah now? He got dat ar way-off-yondah look ergen.” He shook his head forebodingly. “Ah heahed he hummin’ dat tune when he dress hisse’f dis mawnin’. Sing befo’ yo’ eat, cry befo’ yo’ sleep!”
The major had, indeed, a far-away look as he sat there, a heavy lonely figure, that bright morning. It had slipped to his face with the news of the arrival at Damory Court. He told himself that he felt queer. A mocking-bird was singing in atulip-tree outside, and the gray cat sat on the window-sill, watching the foliage with blinking lust. There was no breeze and the leaves of the Virginia creeper that curled about the sash were trembling with the sensuous delight of the sunshine. Suddenly he seemed to hear elfin voices close to his ear:
“Which was it she loved? Valiant or Sassoon?”
It was so distinct that he started, vexed and disturbed. Really, it was absurd. He would be seeing things next! “Southall may be right about that exercise,” he muttered; “I’ll walk more.” He began the projected reform without delay, striding up and down the room. But the little voices presently sounded again, shouting like gnomes inside a hill:
“Which was it? Valiant or Sassoon?”
“I wish to God I knew!” said the major roughly, standing still. It silenced them, but the sound of his own voice, as though it had been a pre-concerted signal, drew together a hundred inchoate images of other days. There was the well-ordered garden of Damory Court—it rose up, gloomy with night shadows, across his great clothes-press against the wall—with himself sitting on a rustic bench smoking and behind him the candle-lighted library window with Beauty Valiant pacing up and down, waiting for daylight. There was a sun-lighted stretch between two hemlocks, with Southall andhe measuring the ground—the grass all dewy sparkles and an early robin teetering on a thorn-bush. Eight—nine—ten—he caught himself counting the paces.
He wiped his forehead. Between the hemlocks now were two figures facing each other, one twitching uncertainly, the other palely rigid; and at one side, held screen-wise, a raised umbrella. In some ghostly way he could see straight through the latter—see the doctor’s hand gripping the handle, his own, outstretched beyond its edge, holding a handkerchief ready to flutter down. A silly subterfuge those umbrellas, but there must be no actual witnesses to the final act of a “gentlemen’s meeting”! A silly code, the whole of it, now happily outgrown! He thought thus with a kind of dumb irritant wonder, while the green picture hung a moment—as a stone thrown in air hangs poised at height before it falls—then dissolved itself in two sharp crackles, with a gasping interval between. The scene blurred into a single figure huddling down—huddling down—
“Which did she love?” The major shook his head helplessly. It was, after all, only the echo, become all at once audible on a shallow woman’s lips, of a question that had always haunted him. It had first come to him on the heels of that duel, when he had stood, somewhat later that hateful morning, holding a saddled horse before the bigpillared porch. It had whispered itself then from every moving leaf. “Sassoon or Valiant?” If she had loved Sassoon, of what use the letter Valiant was so long penning in the library? But—if it were Valiant she loved? The man who, having sworn not to lift his hand against the other, had broken his sacred word to her! Who had stained the unwritten code by facing an opponent maddened with liquor! Yet, what was there a woman might not condone in the one man? Would she read, forgive and send for him?
The major laughed out suddenly, harshly, in the quiet room, and looked down as if he expected to see that letter still lying in his hand. But the laugh could not still a regular pulsing sound that was in his ears—elfin like the voices, but as distinct—the sound of a horse’s hoofs going from Damory Court.
He had heard those hoof-beats echo in his brain for thirty years!
Till the sun was high John Valiant lay on his back in the fragrant grass, meditatively watching a bucaneering chicken-hawk draw widening circles against the blue and listening to the vibrant tattoo of a “pecker-wood” on a far-away tree, and the timorous wet whistle of a bob-white. The sun shone through the tracery of the foliage, making a quivering mosaic of light and shadow all about him. A robin ran across the grass with his breast puffed out as if he had been stealing apples; now and then an inquisitive yellow-hammer darted above and in the bushes cardinals wove slender sharp flashes of living crimson. The whole place was very quiet now. For just one thrilling moment it had burgeoned into sound and movement: when the sweaty horses had stood snorting and stamping in the yard with the hounds scampering between their legs and the riding-coats winking like rubies in the early sunshine!
Had she recognized him as the smudged tinkerer of the stalled car? “She saw me drop that wretchedbrute through the window,” he chuckled. “I could take oath to that. But she didn’t give me away, true little sport that she was. And she won’t. I can’t think of any reason, but I know.” The chuckle broadened to an appreciative grin. “What an ass she must have thought me! To risk a nasty bite and rob her of her brush into the bargain! How she looked at me, just for a minute, with that thoroughbred face, out of those sea-deep eyes, under that whorling, marvelous heaped-up hair of hers! Was she angry? I wonder!”
At length he rose and went back to the house. With a bunch of keys he had found he went to the stables, after some difficulty gained access, and propped the crazy doors and windows open to the sun. The building was airy and well-lighted and contained a dozen roomy box-stalls, a spacious loft and a carriage-house. The straw bedding had been unremoved, mice-gnawed sacking and rotted hay lay in the mangers, and the warped harness, hanging on its pegs, was a smelly mass of mildew and decay. In the carriage-house were three vehicles—a coach with rat-riddled upholstery and old-fashioned hoop-iron springs eaten through with rust, a rockaway and a surrey. The latter had collapsed where it stood. He found a stick, mowed away the festooning cobwebs, and moved the débris piece-meal.
“There!” he said with satisfaction. “There’s aplace for the motor—if Uncle Jefferson ever gets it here.”
It was noon when he returned, after a wash-up in the lake, to the meal with which Aunt Daphne, in a costume dimly suggestive of a bran-meal poultice with a gingham apron on, regaled him. Fried chicken, corn-bread so soft and fluffy that it had to be lifted from the pan with a spoon, browned potatoes, and to his surprise, fresh milk. “Ah done druv ouah ol’ cow ovah, suh,” explained Aunt Daphne. “’Case she gotter be milked, er she run dry ez de Red Sea fo’ de chillen ob Izril.”
“Aunt Daphne,” inquired Valiant with his mouth full, “what do you call this green thing?”
“Dat? Dat’s jes’ turnip-tops, suh, wid er hunk er bacon in de pot. Laws-er-me, et cert’n’y do me good ter see yo’ git arter it dat way, suh. Reck’n yo’ got er appertite! Hyuh, Hyuh!”
“I have. I never guessed it before, and it’s a magnificent discovery. However, it suggests unwelcome reflections. Aunt Daphne, how long do you estimate a man can dine like this on—well, say on a hundred dollars?”
“Er hun’ed dollahs, suh? Dat’s er right smart heap o’ money, ’deed et is! Well, suh, ’pen’s on whut yo’ raises. Ef yo’ raises yo’ own gyarden-sass, en chick’ns en aigs, Ah reck’n yo’ kin live longah dan dat ar Methoosalum, en still haf mos’ of it in de ol’ stockin’.”
“Ah! I can grow all those things myself, you think?”
“Yo’ cert’n’ykin,” said Aunt Daphne. “Ev’ybody do. De chick’ns done peck fo’ deyselves en de yuddah things—yo’ o’ny gotter ’courage ’em en dey jes’ grows.”
Valiant ate his dessert with a thoughtful smile wrinkling his brow. As he pushed back his chair he smote his hands together and laughed aloud. “Back to the soil!” he said. “John Valiant, farmer! The miracle of it is that it sounds good to me. Iwantto raise my own grub and till my own soil. I want to be my own man! And I’m beginning to see my way. Crops will have to wait for another season, but there’s water and pasture for cattle now. There’s timber—lots of it—on that hillside, too. I must look into that.”
He filled his pipe and climbed the staircase to the upper floor. Here the lower hall was duplicated. He proceeded slowly and carefully with the dusty task of window-opening. There were many bedrooms with great four-posted, canopied beds and old-fashioned carved furniture of mahogany and curly-maple, and in one he found a great cedar-lined chest filled with bed-linen and napery. In these rooms were more evidences of decay. They showed in faded hues, streaked and discolored finishings, yellow mildew beneath the glass of framed engravings and unsightly stains on walls and floorsfrom leaks in the roof. On a dainty dressing-table had been left a pin-cushion; its stuffing was strewn in a tiny trickling trail to a mouse-hole in the base-board. The bedroom he mentally chose for his own was the plainest of all, and was above the library, fronting the vagabond garden. It had a great black desk with many glass-knobbed drawers and a book-rack. The volumes this contained were mostly of the historical sort: a history of theMiddle Plantation, Meade’s Old Churches,and at the end a parchment-bound tome inscribedThe Valiants of Virginia.
He lingered longest in a room over whose door was paintedThe Hilarium. It had evidently been a nursery and schoolroom. Here on the walls were many shelves wound over with networks of cobwebs, and piled with the oddest assemblage of toys: wooden and splintered soldiers that had once been bravely painted, dolls in various states of worn-outness—one rag doll in a calico dress with shoe-button eyes and a string of bright glass beads round her neck—a wooden box of marbles, a tattered boxing-glove. There were school-books, too, thumbed and dog-eared, fromFirst Readerto Cæsar’sGallic Wars, with names of small Valiants scrawled on their fly-leaves. He carefully relocked the door of this room; he wanted to dust those toys and books with his own hands.
In the upper hall again he leaned from the window,sniffing the far-flung scent of orchards and peach-blown fence-rows. The soft whirring sound of a bird’s wing went past, almost brushing his startled face, and the old oaks seemed to stretch their bent limbs with a faithful brute-like yawn of pleasure. In the room below he could hear the vigorous sound of Aunt Daphne’s hard-driven broom and the sound flooded the echoing space with a comfortable commotion.
The present task was one after Aunt Daphne’s own heart. A small mountain of dust was growing on the terrace, and as beneath brush and rag the colors of wall and parquetry stood forth, her face became one shiny expanse of ebony satisfaction. When the bulldog, returning from his jaunt, out-stripping Uncle Jefferson, bounced in to prance against her she smote him lustily with her scrubbing-brush.
“Git outer heah, yo’ good-fo’-nuffin’ w’ite rapscallyun! Gwine trapse yo’ muddy feet all ovah dis yeah floor, whut Ah jes’ scrubbed tell yo’ marstah kin eat off’n et?” She broke off to listen to Uncle Jefferson’s voice outside, directed toward the upper window.
“Dat yo’, suh? Yas, suh, dis me. Well, suh, Ah take ol’ Sukey out de Red Road, en Ah hitch huh ter yo’ machine-thing, en she done balk. Won’t go nohow ... whut, suh? ‘Beat huh ovah de haid?’ Yas, suh, done hit huh in de haid six timeswid de whip-han’l, en she look me in de eye en ain’ said er word.... ‘Twis’ huh tail?’Me, suh? No-suh-ree, suh. Mars’ Quarles’ boy one time he twis’ huh tail en dey sen’ him ter de horspit’l. ‘Daid,’ suh? No, suh, ain’ daid, but et mos’ bust him wide open.... ‘Set fiah undah huh?’ Yas, suh, done set fiah undah huh. Mos’ burn up de harness, en ain’ done no good.... Well, suh, Ah jes’ gwineter say no use waitin’ fo’ Sukey ter change huh min’, so Ah put some fence-rails undah huh en jock huh up en come home. En Ah’s gwine out arter suppah en Sukey be all right den, suh, Ah reck’n. Yas, suh.”
Aunt Daphne plunged out with fire in her eye, but the laugh that came from above was reassuring. “Never mind, Uncle Jefferson, Miss Sukey’s whims shall be regarded.”
Chum, bouncing up the stairs like an animated bundle of springs, met his master coming down. “Old man,” said the latter, “I don’t mind telling you that I’m beginning to be taken with this place. But it’s in a bad way, and it’s going to be put in shape. It’s a large order, and we’ll have to work like horses. Don’t you bother Aunt Daph! You just come with your Uncle Dudley. He’s going to take a look over the grounds.”
He went to his trunk and fished out a soft shirt on which he knotted a loose tie, exchanged his Panama for a slouch hat, and whistling the barcarolefromTales of Hoffmann, went gaily out. “I feel tremendously alive to-day,” he confided to the dog, as he tramped through the lush grass. “If you see me ladle the muck out of that fountain with my own fair hands, don’t have a fit. I’m liable to do anything.”
His eye swept up and down the slope. “There probably isn’t a finer site for a house in the whole South,” he told himself. “The living-rooms front south and west. We’ll get scrumptious sunsets from that back porch. And on the other side there’s the view clear to the Blue Ridge. And as for this garden, no landscape artist need apply. The outlines are all here; it needs only to be put back. We’ll first rake out the rubbish, chop down that underbrush and trim the box. The shrubs only want pruning. Then we’ll mend the pool and set the fountain going and put in some goldfish. Flower-seeds and bulbs are cheap enough, I fancy. Just think of a bed of black and gold pansies running down to the lake! And on the other side a wilderness garden. I’ve seen pictures of them in the illustrated weeklies. Those rotten posts, under that snarl of vines, were a pergola. Any old carpenter can rebuild that—I can draw the plans myself.”
He skirted the lake. “Only to grub out some of the lilies—there’s too many of them—and straighten the rim—and weed the pebble marginto give those green rocks a show. I’ll build a little wharf below them to dive from, and—yes, I’ll stock it with spotted trout. Not just to yank out with a barbed hook, but to make it inhabited. How well a couple of white swans would look preening in the shade out there! The roof’s gone from that oval summer-house, but it’s no trick to put another on.”
He penetrated farther into the tangle and came out into a partially cleared space shaded with great trees, where the grass was matted with clover into a thick rug, sprinkled with designs worked in bluebells and field-daisies, with here and there a flaunting poppy, like a scarlet medallion. He was but a few hundred yards from the house, yet the silence was so deep that there might have been no habitation within fifty miles. All at once he stopped short; there was a sudden movement in the thicket beyond—the sound of light fast footfalls, as of some one running away.
He made a lunge for the dog, but with a growl Chum tore himself from the restraining grasp and dashed into the bushes. “A child, no doubt,” he thought as he plunged in pursuit, “and that lubberly brute will scare it half to death!”
He pulled up with an exclamation. In a narrow wood-path a little way from him, partly hidden by a windfall, stood a girl, her skirt transfixed with a wickedly jagged sapling. He saw instantly how ithad happened; the windfall had blocked the way, and she had sprung clean over it, not noting the screened spear, which now held her as effectually as any railroad spike. She was struggling with silent helpless fury to release herself, wrenching viciously at the offending stuff, which seemed ridiculously stout, and disregarding utterly the bulldog, frisking madly about her feet with sharp joyous barks.
In another moment Valiant had reached her and met her face, flushed, half defiant, her eyes a blue gleam of smoldering anger as she desperately, almost savagely, thrust wild tendrils of flame-colored hair beneath the broad curved brim of her straw hat. At her feet lay a great armful of cape jessamines.
A little thrill, light and warm and joyous, ran through him. Until that instant he had not recognized her.
“
I’m so sorry,” was what he said, as he kneeled to release her, and she was grateful that his tone was unmixed with amusement. She bit her lips, as by sheer strength of elbow and knee he snapped the offending bole short off—one of those quick exhibitions of reserved strength that every woman likes. Meanwhile he was uttering banal fragments of sentences: “I hope you’re not hurt. It was that unmannerly dog, I suppose. What a sword-edge that sliver has! A bad tear, I’m afraid. There!—now it’s all right.”
“I don’t know how I could have been so silly—thank you so much,” said Shirley, panting slightly from her exertions. “I’m not the least bit hurt—only my dress—and you know very well that I wasn’t afraid of that ridiculous dog.” A richer glow stole to her cheeks as she spoke, a burning recollection of a rose, which from her horse that morning at Damory Court, she had glimpsed in its glass on the porch.
Both laughed a little. He imagined that he could smell that wonderful hair, a subtle fragrance likethat of sun-dried seaweed or the elusive scent that clings to a tuft of long-plucked Spanish moss. “Chum stands absolved, then,” he said, bending to sweep together the scattered jessamine. “Do you—do you run like that when you’renotfrightened?”
“When I’m caught red-handed. Don’t you?”
He looked puzzled.
She pointed to the flowers. “I had stolen them, and I was trying to ‘’scape off wid ’em’ as the negroes say. Shocking, isn’t it? But you see, nobody has lived here since long before I was born, and I suppose the flower-thieving habit has become ingrown.”
“But,” he interrupted, “there’s acres of them going to waste. Why on earth shouldn’t you have them?”
“Of course I know better to-day, but there was a—a special reason. We have none and this is the nearest place where they grow. My mother wanted some for this particular day.”
“Good heavens!” he cried. “You don’t think you can’t go right on taking them? Why, you can ‘’scape off’ with the whole garden any time!”
A droll little gleam of azure mischief darted at him suddenly out of her eyes and then dodged back again. “Aren’t you just a little rash with other people’s property?”
“Other people’s?”
“What will the owner say?”
He bent back one of the long jessamine stems and wound it around the others. “I can answer for him. Besides, I owe you something, you know. I robbed you this morning—of your brush.”
She looked at him, abruptly serious. “Why did you do that?”
“Sanctuary. His two beady eyes begged so hard for it. ‘Twenty ravenous hounds,’ they said, ‘and a dozen galloping horses. And look what a poor shivering little red-brown morselIam!’”
For just an instant the bronze-gold head gave a quick imperious toss, like a high-mettled pony under the flick of the whip. But as suddenly the shadow of resentment passed; the mobile face under the bent hat-brim turned thoughtful. “Poor little beastie!” she said meditatively. “We so seldom think of his side, do we! We think only of the run, the dog-music, the wild rush along the wet fields, with the horses straining and pounding under us. I’ve ridden to hounds all my life. Everybody does down here.” She looked again at him. “Do you think it’s wrong to kill things?” she asked gravely.
“Oh, dear, no,” he smiled. “I haven’t a singleism. I’m not even a vegetarian.”
“But you would be if you had to kill your own meat?”
“Perhaps. So many of us would. As a matterof fact, I don’t hunt myself, but I’m no reformer.”
“Why don’t you hunt?”
“I don’t enjoy it.” He flushed slightly. “I hate firearms,” he said, a trifle difficultly. “I always have. I don’t know why. Idiosyncrasy, I suppose. But I shouldn’t care for hunting, even with bows and arrows. I would kill a tiger or a poisonous reptile, or anything else, in case of necessity. But even then I should hardly enjoy it. I know some animals are pests and have to be killed. Some men do, too. But I don’t like to do it myself.”
“Wouldn’t that theory lead to a wholesale evasion of responsibility?”
“Perhaps. I’m no philosopher. But a blackbird or a red fox is so pretty, even when he is thieving, that I’d let him have the corn. I’m like the Lord High Executioner inThe Mikadowho was so tender-hearted that he couldn’t execute anybody and planned to begin with guinea-pigs and work up. Only I’m afraid I couldn’t even manage the guinea-pigs.”
She laughed. “You wouldn’t find many to practise on here. Do you raise guinea-pigs up North?”
“Ah,” he said ruefully, “you tag me, too. Have I by chance a large letter N tattooed upon my manly brow? But I suppose it’s the accent. Uncle Jefferson catalogued me in five minutes. He saidhe didn’t knowwhyI was from ‘de Norf,’ but he ‘knowed’ it. I’ve annexed him and his wife, by the way.”
“You’re lucky to have them. Unc’ Jefferson and Aunt Daph might have slipped out of a plantation of the last century. They’re absolutely ante-bellum. Most of the negroes are more or less spoiled, as you’ll find, I’m afraid.” She turned the conversation bluntly. “Had you seen Damory Court before?”
“No, never.”
“Do you like the general plan of the place?”
“Do I like it?” cried John Valiant. “Do Ilikeit!”
A quick pleasure glanced across her face. “It’s nice of you to say it that way. We ask that question so often it’s become mechanical. You see, it’s our great show-place. We exhibit it to strangers as we show them the Natural Bridge and Monticello, and expect them to rhapsodize. Years ago the negroes would never set foot here. The house was supposed to be haunted.”
“I’m not afraid,” he laughed. “I wouldn’t blame any ghost for hanging around. I’m thinking of haunting it myself in a hundred years or so.”
“Oh, the specters are all laid long ago, if there ever were any.”
At that moment a patter of footsteps and shrill shrieks came flying over the last-year’s leaves beyondthe lilac bushes. “It’s Rickey Snyder,” she said, peering out smilingly as two children, pursued and pursuer, burst into view. “Hush!” she whispered; “I wonder what they are up to.”
The pair came in a whirl through the bushes. The foremost was a seven-year-old negro girl, in a single short cottonade garment, wizened, barelegged and bareheaded, her black wool parted in little angular patches and tightly wrapped with bits of cord. The other was white and as freckled as a turkey’s egg, with hair cropped like a boy’s. She held a carving-knife cut from a shingle, whose edge had been deeply ensanguined by poke-berry juice. The pursued one stumbled over a root and came to earth in a heap, while the other pounced upon her like a wildcat.
“Hold still, you limb of Satan,” she scolded. “How can I do it when you won’t stay still?”
“Oh, Lawd,” moaned the prostrate one, in simulated terror; “oh, Doctah, good Doctah Snydah, has Ahgotterhab dat operation? Is yo’ sho’ gwineter twitter eroun’ mah insides wid dem knives en saws en things?”
“It won’t hurt,” reassured the would-be operator; “no more than it did Mis’ Poly Gifford. And I’ll put your liver right back again.”
“Wait er minute. Ah jes’ remembahs Ah fo’got ter make mah will. Ah leabs—”
“Nonsense!” objected the other irritably.“You made it yesterday. They always do it beforehand.”
“No, suh; Ah done clean fergot et. Ah leabs mah thimble ter de Mefodis’ church, en mah black en w’ite kitten ter Rickey Snydah, en—”
“I don’t want your old tabby!” said the beneficiary unfeelingly. “Now flatten out, while I give you the chloroform.”
“All right, Doctah. Ah’s in de free-ward en ’tain’t costin’ me er cent! But Ah’s mighty skeered Ah gwineter wake up daid! Gord A’mighty, ef Ah dies, save mah sinful soul! Oh, Mars’ Judge Jesus, swing dat cha’yut down en kyah me up ter Hebben! Rickey, yo’ reck’n, arter all, Ah’s gwineter be erblackangel? Hesh-sh! Ah’s driftin’ away, Doctah, Ah’s driftin’ away on de big wide ribber.”
“Now you’re asleep,” declared the surgeon, and fell to with a flourish of the gory blade.
The other reared herself. “Huh! How yo’ reck’n Ah’s gwineter be ersleep wid yo’ chunkin’ me in de shoht-ribs wid dat ar stick? Ain’ yo’ done cyarvin’ me up yet?”
“Oh, nurse,” wailed Rickey, turning the drama into a new channel, “I can’t wake Greenie up! She won’t come out of the chloroform! She’s dying. Let’s all sing and maybe it’ll make it easier:
“‘I went down to Jordan and what did I see,Coming for to carry me home?A band of angels waiting for me,Coming for to carry me home!’”
“‘I went down to Jordan and what did I see,Coming for to carry me home?A band of angels waiting for me,Coming for to carry me home!’”
The melody, however, was too much for the prospective corpse. She sat up, shook the dead leaves from her hair and joined in, swaying her lean body to and fro and clapping her yellow-lined hands together in an ecstasy:
“‘Sweeng low! Sweet Char-ee-yut!Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me ho-o-o-ome.Swee-eng low, swee-et Char-ee-yut!Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me home!’”
“‘Sweeng low! Sweet Char-ee-yut!Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me ho-o-o-ome.Swee-eng low, swee-et Char-ee-yut!Comin’ fo’ t’kyah me home!’”
The two were a strange contrast as they sang, the negro child swaying with the emotionalism of her race and her voice dropping instinctively to a soft alto accompaniment to the other’s rigid soprano, and lending itself to subtle half-tones and minor cadences.
A twig snapped under Valiant’s foot. The singers faced about and saw them. Both scrambled to their feet, the black girl to look at them with a wide self-conscious grin. Rickey, tossing her short hair back from her freckled face, came toward them.
“My goodness, Miss Shirley,” she said, “we didn’t see you at all.” She looked at Valiant. “Are you the man that’s going to fix up Damory Court?” she inquired, without any tedious formalities.
“Yes,” said Valiant.
“Well,” she said critically, “you’ve got your job cut out for you. But I should say you’re the kind to do it.”
“Rickey!” Shirley’s voice tried to be stern, but there was a hint of laughter in it.
“What did I say now?” inquired Rickey. “I’m sure I meant it to be complimentary.”
“It was,” said Valiant. “I shall try to deserve your good opinion.”
“But what a ghastly play!” exclaimed Shirley. “Where did you learn it?”
“We were playing Mis’ Poly Gifford in the hospital,” Rickey answered. “She’s got a whole lot of little pebbles that they cut out—”
“Oh, Rickey!” expostulated Shirley with a shudder.
“Theydid. She keeps them in a little pasteboard box like wedding-cake, with a blue ribbon around it. She was showing it to Miss Mattie Sue yesterday. She was telling her all about it. She said all the women there showed each other their cuts and bragged about how long they were.”
Valiant’s merriment rang out under the trees, but Shirley was crimson. “Well, I don’t think it’s a nice play,” she said decidedly.
“That’s just the way,” murmured Rickey disconsolately, “yesterday it wasRomeo and Julietwiththe Meredith children, and their mother had a conniption fit.”
“Was that gruesome, too?”
“Not so very. I only poisoned Rosebud and June and stabbed myself. I don’t callthatgruesome.”
“You certainly have a highly developed taste for the dramatic,” said Shirley. “I wonder what your next effort will be.”
“It’s to-morrow,” Rickey informed her. “We’re going to have the duel between Valiant and Sassoon.”
The smile was stricken from John Valiant’s face. A duel—theduel—between Valiant and Sassoon! He felt his blood beat quickly. Had there been such a thing in his father’s life? Was that what had blighted it?
“Only not here where it really happened, but in the Meredith orchard. Greenie’s going to be—”
“Ah ain’!” contradicted Greenie. “Ah ain’ gwineter be dat Valiant, nohow!”
“You are, too!” insisted Rickey wrathfully. “You needn’t be so pickety and choosety—and after she kills Sassoon, we put the bloodhounds on her trail.”
Greenie tittered. “Dey ain’ no dawg eroun’ heah’d techme,” she said, “en ’sides—”
“But, Rickey,” Shirley interposed, “that wasn’ta murder. That was a duel between gentlemen. They don’t—”
“I know it,” assented Rickey cheerfully. “But it makes it more exciting.Willyou come, Miss Shirley, deed and double? I won’t charge you any admission.”
“I can’t promise,” said Shirley. “I might stand the duel, but I’m afraid the hounds would be too blood-curdling. By the way,” she added, “isn’t it about time Miss Mattie Sue had her tea?”
“It certainly is, Miss Shirley!” said Rickey, with penitent emphasis. “I clean forgot it, and she’ll row me up the gump-stump! Come on, Greenie,” and she started off through the bushes.
But the other hung back. “Ah done tole yo’ Ah ain’ gwine be dat Valiant,” she said stubbornly.
“Look here, Greenville Female Seminary Simms,” Rickey retorted, “don’t you multiply words with me just because your mammy was working there when you were born and gave you a fancy name! If you’ll promise to be him, I’ll get Miss Mattie Sue to let us make molasses candy.”
Shirley looked at Valiant with a deepening of her dimple. “Rickey isn’t an aristocrat,” she said: “she’s what we call here poor-white, but she’s got a heart of gold. She’s an orphan, and the neighborhood in general, and Miss Mattie Sue Mabry in particular, have adopted her.”
He hardly heard her words for the painful wonder that was holding him. He had canvassed many theories to explain his father’s letter but such a thing as a duel he had never remotely imagined. His father had taken a man’s life. Was it this thought—whatever the provocation, however justified by the customs of the time and section—that had driven him to self-exile? He recalled himself with an effort, for she was speaking again.
“You’ve found Lovers’ Leap, no doubt?”
“No. This is the first time I’ve been so far from the house. Is it near here?”
“I’ll show it to you.” She held out her hand for the bunch of jessamine and laid it on the broad roots of a tree that were mottled with lichen.“Look there,” she said suddenly; “isn’t that a beauty?”
She was pointing to a jimson-weed on which had settled, with glassy wings vibrating, a long, ungainly, needle-like insect with an odd sword-like beak. “What is that?” he asked.
“A snake-doctor. If Unc’ Jefferson were here he’d say, ‘Bettah watch out! Dah’s er snek roun’ erbout heah, sho’!’ He’ll fill you full of darky superstitions.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m being introduced to them hourly. I’ve met the graveyard rabbit—one of them had hoodooed my motor yesterday. I’m to carry a buckeye in my pocket—by the way, is a buckeye a horse-chestnut?—if I want to escape rheumatism. I’ve learned that it’s bad luck to make a bargain on a Friday, and the weepy consequences of singing before breakfast.” A blue-jay darted by them, to perch on a limb and eye them saucily. “And the jay-bird! He goes to hell every Friday noon to carry brimstone and tell the devil what folks have been up to.”
She clapped her hands. “You’re certainly learning fast. When I was little I used to be delighted to see a blue-jay in the cedars on Friday afternoon. It was a sign we’d been so good there was nothing to tell. Follow me now and I’ll show you the view from Lovers’ Leap. But look down. Don’t lift your eyes till I tell you.”
He dropped his gaze to the small brown boots and followed, his eyes catching low side-glimpses of woodsy things—the spangled dance of leaf-shadows, a chameleon lizard whisking through the roots of the bracken, the creamy wavering wings of a white moth resting on a dead stump. Suddenly the slim path between the trees took a quick turn, and fell away at their feet. “There,” she said. “This is the finest view at Damory Court.”
They stood on the edge of a stony ravine which widened at one end to a shallow marshy valley. The rocks were covered with gray-green feathery creepers, enwound with curly yellow tendrils of love-vine. Across the ravine, on a lower level, began a grove of splendid trees that marched up into the long stretch of neglected forest he had seen from the house. Looking down the valley, fields of young tobacco lay tier on tier, and beyond, in the very middle of the mellow vaporous distance, lifted the tapering tower of a far-off church, hazily outlined against the azure.
“You love it?” he asked, without withdrawing his eyes.
“I’ve loved it all my life. I love everything about Damory Court. Ruined as it is, it is still one of the most beautiful estates in all Virginia. There’s nothing finer even in Italy. Just behind us, where those hemlocks stand, is where the duel the children spoke of was fought.”
He turned his head. “Tell me about it,” he said.
She glanced at him curiously. “Didn’t you know? That was the reason the place was abandoned. Valiant, who lived here, and the owner of another plantation, who was named Sassoon, quarreled. They fought, the story is, under those big hemlock trees. Sassoon was killed.”
He looked out across the distance; he could not trust his face. “And—Valiant?”
“He went away the same day and never came back; he lived in New York till he died. He was the father of the Court’s present owner. You never heard the story?”
“No,” he admitted. “I—till quite recently I never heard of Damory Court.”
“As a little girl,” she went on, “I had a very vivid imagination, and when I came here to play I used to imagine I could see them, Valiant so handsome—his nickname was Beauty Valiant—and Sassoon. How awful to come to such a lovely spot, just because of a young man’s quarrel, and to—to kill one’s friend! I used to wonder if the sky was blue that day and whether poor Sassoon looked up at it when he took his place; and whom else he thought of that last moment.”
“Had he parents?”
“No, neither of them had, I believe. But there might have been some one else,—some one he cared for and who cared for him. That was the last duelever fought in Virginia. Dueling was a dreadful custom. I’m glad it’s gone. Aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said slowly, “it was a thing that cut two ways. Perhaps Valiant, if he could have had his choice afterward, would rather have been lying there that morning than Sassoon.”
“He must have suffered, too,” she agreed, “or he wouldn’t have exiled himself as he did. I used to wonder if it was a love-quarrel—whether they could have been in love with the same woman.”
“But why should he go away?”
“I can’t imagine, unless she had really loved the other man. If so, she couldn’t have borne seeing Valiant afterward.” She paused with a little laugh. “But then,” she said, “it may have been nothing so romantic. Perhaps they quarreled over cards or differed as to whose horse was the better jumper. Valiant’s grandfather, who was known as Devil-John, is said to have called a man out because he rode past him on the wrong side. Our ancestors in Virginia, I’m afraid, didn’t stand on ceremony when they felt uppish.”
He did not smile. He was looking out once more over the luminous stretch of fields, his side-face toward her. Curious and painful questions were running through his brain. With an effort, he thrust these back and recalled his attention to what she was saying.
“You wonder, I suppose, that we feel as wedo toward these old estates, and set store by them, and—yes, and brag of them insufferably as we do. But it’s in our blood. We love them as the English do their ancient manors. They have made our legends and our history. And the history of Virginia—”
She broke off with a shrug and, more himself now, he finished for her: “—isn’t exactly a trifling part of the history of these United States. You are right.”
“You Northerners think we are desperately conceited,” she smiled, “but it’s true. We’re still as proud of our land, and its old, old places, and love them as well as our ancestors ever did. We wouldn’t change a line of their stately old pillars or a pebble of their darling homey gardens. Do you wonder we resent their passing to people who don’t care for them in the Southern way?”
“But suppose the newcomersdocare for them?”
Her lips curled. “A young millionaire who has lived all his life in New York, to care for Damory Court! A youth idiotically rich, brought up in a superheated atmosphere of noise and money!”
He started uncontrollably. So that was what she thought! He felt himself flushing. He had wondered what would be his impression of the neighborhood and its people; their possible opinion of himself had never occurred to him.
“Why,” she went on, “he’s never cared enoughabout the place even to come and see it. For reasons of his own—good enough ones, perhaps, according to the papers,—he finds himself tired of the city. I can imagine him reflecting.” With a mocking simulation of a brown-study, she put her hand to her brow, pushing impatiently back the wayward luster: “‘Let me see. Don’t I own an estate somewhere in the South? Ah-ha! yes. If I remember, it’s in Virginia. I’ll send down and fix up the old hovel.’ Then he telephones for his architect to run down and see what ‘improvements’ it needs. And—here you are!”
He laughed shortly—a tribute to her mimicry—but it was a difficult laugh. The desperately ennuyée pose, the lax drawl, the unaccustomed mental effort and the sudden self-congratulatory “ah-ha!”—hitting off to a hair the lackadaisical boredom of the haplessly rich young boulevardier—this was the countryside’s pen-picture ofhim!
“Don’t you consider a longing for nature a wholesome sign?”
“Perhaps. The vagaries of the rich are always suggestive.”
“You think there’s no chance of his choosing to stay here because he actually likes it?”
“Not the slightest,” she said indifferently.
“You are so certain of this without ever having seen him?”
She glanced at him covertly, annoyedly sensibleof the impropriety of the discussion, since the man discussed was certainly his patron, maybe his friend. But his insistence had roused a certain balky wilfulness that would have its way. “It’s true I’ve never seen him,” she said, “but I’ve read about him a hundred times in the Sunday supplements. He’s a regular feature of the high-roller section. His idea of a good time is a dog-banquet at Sherry’s. Why, a girl told me once that there was a cigarette named after him—the Vanity Valiant!”
An angry glint slanted across his eyes. For some reason the silly story on her lips stung him deeply. “You find the Sunday newspapers always so dependable?”
“Well,” she flashed, “you must know Mr. Valiant.Ishe a useful citizen? What has he ever done except play polo and furnish spicy paragraphs for the society columns?”
“Isn’t that beside the point? Because he has been an idler, must he necessarily be a—vandal?”
She laughed again. “Hewouldn’t call it vandalism. He’d think it decided improvement to make Damory Court as frantically different as possible. I suppose he’ll erect a glass cupola and a porte-cochère, all up-to-date and varnishy, and put orchid hot-houses where the wilderness garden was, and a modern marble cupid instead of the summer-house, and lay out a kite-shaped track—”
Everything that was impulsive and explosive in John Valiant’s nature came out with a bang. “No!” he cried, “whatever else he is, he’s not such a preposterous ass as that!”
She faced him squarely now. Her eyes were sparkling. “Since you know him so intimately and so highly approve of him—”
“No, no,” he interrupted. “You mistake me. I shouldn’t try to justify him.” His flush had risen to the roots of his brown hair, but he did not lower his gaze. Now the red color slowly ebbed, leaving him pale. “Hehasbeen an idler—that’s true enough—and till a week ago he was ‘idiotically rich.’ But his idling is over now. At this moment, except for this one property, he is little better than a beggar.”
She had taken a hasty step or two back from him, and her eyes were now fixed on his with a dawning half-fearful question in them.
“Till the failure of the Valiant Corporation, he had never heard of Damory Court, much less been aware that he owned it. It wasn’t because he loved it that he came here—no! How could it be? He had never set foot in Virginia in his mortal life.”
She put up her hands to her throat with a start. “Came?” she echoed. “Came!”
“But if you think that even he could be so crassly stupid, so monumentally blind to all that is really fine and beautiful—”
“Oh!” she cried with flashing comprehension. “Oh, how could you! You—”
He nodded curtly. “Yes,” he said. “I am that haphazard harlequin, John Valiant, himself.”
There was a pause not to be reckoned by minutes but suffocatingly long. She had grown as pale as he.
“That was ungenerous of you,” she said then with icy slowness. “Though no doubt you—found it entertaining. It must have still further amused you to be taken for an architect?”
“I am flattered,” he replied, with a trace of bitterness, “to have suggested, even for a moment, so worthy a calling.”
Though he spoke calmly enough, his thoughts were in ragged confusion. As her gaze dived into his, he was conscious of outré fancies. She seemed to him like some snow-cloud in woman’s shape, edged with anger and swept by a wrathful wind into this summery afternoon. For her part she was telling herself with passionate resentment that he had no right so to misrepresent himself—to lead her on to such a dénouement. At his answer she put out her hand with a sudden gesture, as if bluntly thrusting the matter from her concern, and turning, went back along the tree-shadowed path.
He followed glumly, gnawing his lip, wanting to say he knew not what, but wretchedly tongue-tied, noting that the great white moth was still waving its creamy wings on the dead stump and wondering if she would take the cape jessamines. He felt an embarrassed relief when, passing the roots where they lay, she stooped to raise them.
Then all at once the blood seemed to shrink from his heart. With a hoarse cry he leaped toward her, seized her wrist and roughly dragged her back, feeling as he did so, a sharp fiery sting on his instep. The next moment, with clenched teeth, he was viciously stamping his heel again and again, driving into the soft earth a twisting root-like something that slapped the brown wintered leaves into a hissing turmoil.
He had flung her from him with such violence that she had fallen sidewise. Now she raised herself, kneeling in the feathery light, both hands clasped close to her breast, trembling excessively with loathing and feeling the dun earth-floor billow like a canvas sea in a theater. Little puffs of dust from the protesting ground were wreathing about her set face, and she pressed one hand against her shoulder to repress her shivers.
“The horrible—horrible—thing!” she said whisperingly. “It would have bitten me!”
He came toward her, panting, and grasping her hand, lifted her to her feet. He staggered slightlyas he did so, and she saw his lips twist together oddly. “Ah,” she gasped, “it bit you! It bit you!”
“No,” he said, “I think not.”
“Look! There on your ankle—that spot!”
“I did feel something, just that first moment.” He laughed uncertainly. “It’s queer. My foot’s gone fast asleep.”
Every remnant of color left her face. She had known a negro child who had died of a water-moccasin’s bite some years before—the child of a house-servant. It had been wading in the creek in the gorge. The doctor had said then that if one of the other children....
She grasped his arm. “Sit down,” she commanded, “here, on this log, and see.”
Her pale fright caught him. He obeyed, dragged off the low shoe and bared the tingling spot. The firm white flesh was puffing up around two tiny blue-rimmed punctures. He reached into his pocket, then remembered that he had no knife. As a next best thing he knotted his handkerchief quickly above the ankle, thrust a stick through the loop and twisted it till the ligature cut deeply, while she knelt beside him, her lips moving soundlessly, saying over and over to herself words like these: “I must not be frightened. He doesn’t realize the danger, but I do! I must be quite collected. It is a mile to the doctor’s. I might run to the houseand send Unc’ Jefferson, but it would take too long. Besides, the doctor might not be there. There is no one to do anything but me.”
She crouched beside him, putting her hands by his on the stick and wrenching it over with all her strength. “Tighter, tighter,” she said. “It must be tighter.” But, to her dismay, at the last turn the improvised cord snapped, and the released stick flew a dozen feet away.
Her heart leaped chokingly, then dropped into hammer-like thudding. He leaned back on one arm, trying to laugh, but she noted that his breath came shortly as if he had been running. “Absurd!” he said, frowning. “How such—a fool thing—can hurt!”
Suddenly she threw herself on the ground and grasped his foot with both her hands. He could see her face twitch with shuddering, and her eyes dilating with some determined purpose.
“What are you going to do?”
“This,” she said, and he felt her shrinking lips, warm and tremulous, pressed hard against his instep.
He drew away sharply, with savage denial. “No—no! Not that! You shan’t! My lord—you shan’t!” He dragged his numbing foot from her desperate grasp, lifting himself, pushing her from him; but she fought with him, clinging, panting broken sentences:
“You must! It’s the only way. It was—a moccasin, and it’s deadly. Every minute counts!”
“I won’t. No, stop! How do you know? It’s not going to—here, listen! Take your hands away. Listen!—Listen!I can go to the house and send Uncle Jefferson for the doctor and he—No! stop, I say! Oh—I’m sorry if I hurt you. How strong you are!”
“Let me!”
“No! Your lips are not for that—good God, that damnable thing! You yourself might be—”
“Let me! Oh, how cruel you are! It was my fault. But for me it would never have—”
“No! I would rather—”
“Let me!Oh, if youdied!”
With all the force of her strong young body she wrenched away his protestant hands. A thirst and a sickish feeling were upon him, a curious irresponsible giddiness, and her hair which that struggle had brought in tumbled masses about her shoulders, seemed to have little flames running all over it. His foot had entirely lost its feeling. There was a strange weakness in his limbs.
He felt it with a cool thriving surprise. Could it be death stealing over him—really death, in this silly inglorious guise, from a miserable crawling reptile? Death, when he had just begun a life that seemed so worth living?
A sense of unreality came. He was asleep! Thefailure, the investigation, Virginia—all was a dream. Presently he would wake in his bachelor quarters to find his man setting out his coffee and grapefruit. He settled back and closed his eyes.
Moments of half-consciousness, or consciousness jumbled with strange imaginings, followed. At times he felt the pressure upon the wounded foot, was sensible of the suction of the young mouth striving desperately to draw the poison from the wound. From time to time he was conscious of a white desperate face haloed with hair that was a mist of woven sparkles. At times he thought himself a recumbent stone statue in a wood, and her a great tall golden-headed flower lying broken at his feet. Again he was a granite boulder and she a vine with yellow leaves winding and clinging about him. Then a blank—a sense of movement and of troublous disturbance, of insistent voices that called to him and inquisitive hands that plucked at him, and then voices growing distant again, and hands falling away, and at last—silence.
Inky clouds were gathering over the sunlight when Shirley came from Damory Court, along the narrow wood-path under the hemlocks, and the way was striped with blue-black shadows and filled with sighing noises. She walked warily, halting often at some leafy rustle to catch a quick breath of dread. As she approached the tree-roots where the cape jessamines lay, she had to force her feet forward by sheer effort of will. At a little distance from them she broke a stick and with it managed to drag the bunch to her, turning her eyes with a shiver from the trampled spot near by. She picked up the flowers, and treading with caution, retraced her steps to the wider path.
She stepped into the Red Road at length in the teeth of a thunder-storm, which had arisen almost without warning to break with the passionate intensity of electric storms in the South. The green-golden fields were now a gray seethe of rain and the farther peaks lifted like huge tumbled masses of onyx against a sky stippled with wan yellow and vicious violet. The wind leaped and roared andswished through the weeping foliage, lashing the dull Pompeian-red puddles, swirling leaves and twigs from the hedges and seeming to be intent on dragging her very garments from her as she ran.
There was no shelter, but even had there been, she would not have sought it. The turbulence of nature around her matched, in a way, her overstrained feeling, and she welcomed the fierce bulge of the wind in the up-blowing whorls of her hair and the drenching wetness of the rain. At length, out of breath, she crouched down under a catalpa tree, watching the fangs of lightning knot themselves against the baleful gray-yellow dimness, making sudden flares of unbearable brightness against which twigs etched themselves with the unrelieved sharpness of black paper silhouettes.
She tried to fix her mind on near things, the bending grasses, the scurrying red runnels and flapping shrubbery, but her thoughts wilfully escaped the tether, turning again and again to the events of the last two hours. She pictured Unc’ Jefferson’s eyes rolling up in ridiculous alarm, his winnowing arm lashing his indignant mule in his flight for the doctor.
At the mental picture she choked with hysterical laughter, then cringed suddenly against the sopping bark. She saw again the doctor’s gaze lift from his first examination of the tiny punctures to send a swift penetrant glance straight at her, before hebent his great body to carry the unconscious man to the house. Again a fit of shuddering swept over her. Then, all at once, tears came, strangling sobs that bent and swayed her. It was the discharge of the Leyden jar, the loosing of the tense bow-string, and it brought relief.
After a time she grew quieter. He would perhaps still be lying on the couch in the dull-colored library, under the one-eyed portrait, his hair waving crisply against the white blanket, his hands moving restlessly, his lips muttering. Her imagination followed Aunt Daph shuffling to fetch this and that, nagged by the doctor’s sharp admonitions.
He would get well! The thought that perhaps she had saved his life gave her a thrill that ran over her whole body. And until yesterday she had never seen him! She kneeled in the blurred half-light, pushing her wet hair back from her forehead and smiling up in the rain that still fell fast.
In a few moments she rose and went on. The lightning came now at longer and more irregular intervals and the thunder pealed less heavily. The wan yellow murk was lifting. Here and there a soaked sun-beam peered half-frightened through the racked mist-wreaths, as though to smell the over-sweet fragrance of the wet jessamine in her arms.
At the gate of the Rosewood lane stood a mailbox on a cedar post and she paused to fish out a draggled Richmond newspaper. As she thrust itunder her arm her eye caught a word of a head-line. With a flush she tore it from its soggy wrapper, the wetted fiber parting in her eager fingers, and resting her foot on the lower rail of the gate, spread it open on her knee.
She stood stock-still until she had read the whole. It was the story of John Valiant’s sacrifice of his private fortune to save the ruin of the involved Corporation.
Its effect upon her was a shock. She felt her throat swell as she read; then she was chilled by the memory of what she had said to him: “What has he ever done except play polo and furnish spicy paragraphs for the society columns?”
“What a beast I was!” she said, addressing the wet hedge. “He had just done that splendid thing. It was because of that that he was little better than a beggar, and I said those horrible things!” Again she bent her eyes, rereading the sentences: “Took his detractors by surprise ... had just sustained a grilling at the hands of the State’s examiner which might well have dried at their fount the springs of sympathy.”
She crushed up the paper in her hand and rested her forehead on the wet rail. Idiotically rich—a vandal—a useless purse-proudflâneur. She had called him all that! She could still see the paleness of his look as she had said it.
Shirley, overexcited as she still was, felt thesobs returning. These, however, did not last long and in a moment she found herself smiling again. Though she had hurt him, she had saved him, too! When she whispered this over to herself it still thrilled and startled her. She folded the paper and hastened on under the cherry-trees.
Emmaline, the negro maid was waiting anxiously on the porch. She was thin to spareness, with a face as brown as a tobacco leaf, restless black eyes and wool neatly pinned and set off by an amber comb.
“Honey,” called Emmaline, “I’se been feahin’ fo’ yo’ wid all that lightnin’ r’arin’ eroun’. Do yo’ remembah when yo’ useter run up en jump plumb down in th’ middle of yore feddah-baid en covah up dat little gol’ haid, en I useter tell yo’ th’ noise was th’ Good Man rollin’ eroun’ his rain-barr’l?” She laughed noiselessly, holding both hands to her thin sides. “Yo’ grow’d up now so yo’ ain’ skeered o’ nothin’ this side th’ Bad Place! Yo’ got th’ jess’mine? Give ’em to Em’line. She’ll fix ’em all nice, jes’ how Mis’ Judith like.”
“All right, Emmaline,” replied Shirley. “And I’ll go and dress. Has mother missed me?”
“No’m. She ain’ lef’ huh room this whole blessed day. Now yo’ barth’s all ready—all ’cep’n th’ hot watah, en I sen’ Ranston with that th’ fus’ thing. Yo’ hurry en peel them wet close off yo’se’f, or yo’ have one o’ them digested chills.”
Her young mistress flown and the hot water despatched, the negro woman spread a cloth on the floor and began to cut and dress the long stalks of the flowers. This done she fetched bowls and vases, and set the pearly-white clumps here and there—on the dining-room sideboard, the hall mantel and the desk of the living-room—till the delicate fragrance filled the house, quite vanquishing the rose-scent from the arbors.
When all was done, she stood in the doorway with arms akimbo, turning about to survey her handiwork. “Mis’ Judith be pleas’ with that,” she said, nodding her woolly head with vigor. “Wondah why she want them sprangly things! All th’ res’ o’ th’ time roses, but ’bout onct a yeah seems like she jes’ got to have them jess’mine en nothin’ else.”
She swept up the scattered twigs and leaves, and going into the dining-room, began to lay the table for dinner. This room was square and low, with a carved console and straight-backed chairs thinly cushioned in faded blue to match the china. The olive-gray walls were brightened with the soft dull gold of an old mirror and picture frames from which dim faces looked placidly down. The crumbling splendor of the storm-racked sunset fell through old-fashioned leaded window-panes, tinging the white Capodimonte figures on the mantelpiece.
As the trim colored woman moved lightly about in the growing dusk, with the low click of glass andmuffled clash of silver, the lighttat-tatof a cane sounded, and she ran to the hall, where Mrs. Dandridge was descending the stairway, one slim white hand holding the banister, under the edge of a white silk shawl which drooped its heavy fringes to her daintily-shod feet. On the lower step she halted, looking smilingly about at the blossoming bowls.
“Don’they smell up th’ whole house?” said Emmaline. “I knowed yo’ be pleas’, Mis’ Judith. Now put yo’ han’ on mah shouldah en I’ll take yo’ to yo’ big cha’h.”
They crossed the hall, the dusky form bending to the fragile pressure of the fingers. “Now heah’s yo’ cha’h. Ranston he made up a little fiah jes’ to take th’ damp out, en th’ big lamp’s lit, en Miss Shirley’ll be down right quick.”
A moment later, in fact, Shirley descended the stair, in a filmy gown of India-muslin, with a narrow belting of gold, against whose flowing sleeves her bare arms showed with a flushed pinkness the hue of the pale coral beads about her neck. The damp newspaper was in her hand.
At her step her mother turned her head: she was listening intently to voices that came from the garden—a child’s shrill treble opposing Ranston’s stentorian grumble.
“Listen, Shirley. What’s that Rickey is telling Ranston?”
“Don’ yo’ come heah wid yo’ no-count play-actin’. Cyan’ fool Ranston wid no sich snek-story, neidah. Ain’ no moc’sin at Dam’ry Co’ot, en nebbahwas!”
“There was, too!” insisted Rickey. “One bit him and Miss Shirley found him and sent Uncle Jefferson for Doctor Southall and it saved his life! So there! Doctor Southall told Mrs. Mason. And he isn’t a man who’s just come to fix it up, either; he’s the really truly man that owns it!”
“Who on earth is that child talking about?”
Shirley put her arm around her mother and kissed her. Her heart was beating quickly. “The owner has come to Damory Court. He—”
The small book Mrs. Dandridge held fell to the floor. “The owner! What owner?”
“Mr. Valiant—Mr. John Valiant. The son of the man who abandoned it so long ago.” As she picked up the fallen volume and put it into her mother’s hands, Shirley was startled by the whiteness of her face.
“Dearest!” she cried. “You are ill. You shouldn’t have come down.”
“No. It’s nothing. I’ve been shut up all day. Go and open the other window.”
Shirley threw it wide. “Can I get your salts?” she asked anxiously.
Her mother shook her head. “No,” she said almost sharply. “There’s nothing whatever the matterwith me. Only my nerves aren’t what they used to be, I suppose—and snakes alwaysdidget on them. Now, give me the gist of it first. I can wait for the rest. There’s a tenant at Damory Court. And his name’s John—Valiant. And he was bitten by a moccasin. When?”
“This afternoon.”
Mrs. Dandridge’s voice shook. “Will he—will he recover?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Beyond any question?”
“The doctor says so.”
“And you found him, Shirley—you?”
“I was there when it happened.” She had crouched down on the rug in her favorite posture, her coppery hair against her mother’s knee, catching strange reddish over-tones like molten metal, from the shaded lamp. Mrs. Dandridge fingered her cane nervously. Then she dropped her hand on the girl’s head.
“Now,” she said, “tell meallabout it.”